Plain Dosa

‘Dosa’ is the king among all the south indian breakfast dishes. Specially in Andhra Pradesh. A must dish to be included in Breakfast almost every week. Who doesn’t love it once tasted! A simple plain dosa is a fermented crepe or which looks like a pancake made with the batter of soaked rice and soaked black lentils/black gram(urad dal/minappappu). This dosa can be turned out into ‘n’ number of variations of your choice. Sometimes there goes a Dosa mela(Dosa fest) at restaurants with minimum of 30 and more dosa varieties. Interesting isn’t it! I will bring out to my blog as many as I can :). For now, here is simple plain Dosa and the batter preparation details. Happy Cooking!

Ingredients:

1 cup Black gram/urad dal/minappappu
2 1/2 cups Rice(I use regular Sona Masoori, Basmati Rice(can be found in regular walmart and sam’s stores too) also works well)
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
A fistful of flattened rice/poha/atukulu
Salt as needed
Water as needed to make the batter
Oil to fry Dosas

My Recipe:

1. Wash and Soak Rice,fenugreek seeds and lentils in a large bowl with enough water, leveling upto 3″ above the rice-lentils mix in the bowl, for atleast 5-6 hours.

2. Soak similarly the flattened rice in a seperate bowl.

3. After 5-6hrs, make a smooth batter with the the rice+lentils+fenugreek seeds and flattened rice adding little water in between as needed. Collect the batter in a large bowl which has enough free space, because after fermentation, it increases in volume.

4. You can add some more water after collecting the batter into the bowl and remember, the consistency of the batter should be in such a way that, a spoon dipped in it should not too much thickly coated when removed. You can still alter the thickness of the batter later while spreading, if it is too thick. But, if you make it too thin at this point, you may not be able to make a nice Dosa. So, do not get tempted to add more water.

5. Now mix salt to the batter and leave the bowl covered in a warm place overnight(about 12 hrs)to ferment. Here in US, usually we leave it in the Oven with the light on.

6. The next day, or after 12hrs, remove the bowl and see, the batter must have doubled well in volume. Now, the batter is ready to make Dosas.

7. If you observe the batter, it must have got too many tiny tiny air bubbles. It good to retain them as much as possible. Take a laddle and give the batter a gentle mix from bottom to top in the bowl. Do not mix it too thoroughly.

8. Heat a flat non-stick pan or a cast iron dosa pan, and while it is getting heated up, make sure you arrange a bowl with some oil, with a small spoon to spread the oil and a wooden spatula to flip the dosas.

9. Once the pan is hot, put 4-5 drops of oil in the center of the pan, gently spread it with the spoon to coat the pan in it’s center. Do not do it harshly as the spoon might damage the non-stick. You can also use an oil spray.

10. First, try a very small dosa. Take a very little amount of batter with a laddle(to check the consistency and salt), pour it completely and gently on the oil coated area of the pan. Spread it sweeping the laddle in cicular motion starting from center(check the consistency while spreading the batter, it is too thick to spread, add little water and mix the batter for the next dosas).

11.Now pour few oil drops to the edges of dosa and over the surface of dosa. Let it fry for a while, you’ll notice the upper surface of dosa cooked(it will no more look like a soft white batter). The pics shown below are regular size dosas, not the tiny one 🙂

12. Now flip the dosa on the pan with a wooden spatula and now the surface should have got a nice golden brown color. cook the other side for a minute.

13. Remove this little dosa from the pan and check the salt. If everything is ok, next, take 3/4th full batter with the laddle and pour in the center of the pan and spread it as explained in step 10 and repeat step 11,12.

14. Flip it again and fold it to half, remove from the pan and serve with coconut chutney and sambar, or any other chutney of your choice.

There is another way of folding this Plain dosa, it looks like a pyramid, me n my sis in childhood used to call it pyramid dosa, cone dosa 😀 Follow these steps for this fold.

1. After the dosa is cooked on the second side and flipped back, now instead of folding it simply into half, follow these steps. Initially you have to make a slit from center of the dosa to the edge using your wooden spatula. Now follow the photographs below.

Hi this is karteek from india, usually i used to help my mother by making dosa i have some queries regarding to thid dos preparation
1) is it require to flip the dosa on the pan, Generally no need to flip the dosa, if it is Attu(thicker than dosa)flipping is required.
2) in pyramid dosa you have made it with with out flipping,litlle bit contradiction with your first and second one please calrify.

You are right in a way. Unless it is a paper dosa, my personal suggestion would be, for a regular dosa, flip once for a while(jus few seconds) and for a paper/thin dosa, no flip! Just Spread the batter, make sure that there are no white uncooked fresh batter patches after you spread. Wait for 10 more seconds when all the patches are gone, fold the dosa and serve it. In the second scenario, since I wanted to make a cone, I made a thin dosa than before and so did not flip it. If I did that, the second side also would get fried a bit, lose it’s softness a bit and would not allow me to tear it nicely to make a cone. Hope I made you clear 🙂